Simpler Machines

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Season 1

The first "season" of this newsletter. Burnout, mental health, pairing, software.

An Interview with Ignition Works

Hey there. You're reading Simpler Machines, a weekly newsletter about the human side of software development. I'm Nat Bennett, a former Cloud Foundry engineer, current writer, and occasional software consultant. This is going to be the last issue until the new year, when I'll start "season two." (I'm doing a

An office with a door that closes

I don't need to win an argument with anyone, even with myself, about whether the thing that makes me happy and comfortable also makes me more productive.

Why Does Pivotal Tracker Have a Priority Field?

Does the Tracker team even use Tracker itself anymore?

An Interview with Josh Aresty, Tech Lead at Braintree

We talked about pairing, story acceptance, process change, adapting to remote work, and a neat technique I’d never heard of before for weekly planning.

Newsletter Recommendations

Here's the neighborhood you're in right now. These aren't the only newsletters I read, but they're the ones that have most influenced this one, or that I find the most consistently interesting.

Conservation of Conflict

You can make conflict more pleasant, but only if you stop trying to get rid of it.

Code is a load-bearing poem (and a pop-up newsletter)

A program is a poem that you write for two audiences: The computer, and every programmer who comes after you.

Why you need a "WTF Notebook"

There's a very specific reputation I want to have on a team: "Nat helps me solve my problems. Nat get things I care about done."

Do you want to do things that matter, or do you want to be busy?

Work, itself, is an opiate. And you can't do your best work when you're stoned.

Some light Kubernetes skepticism

I'm pleased to see VMware "succeeding with success" and sticking with Cloud Foundry on BOSH for what that system is really good at: Mission critical apps.